


Natalie, Natalya, Natasha

by wintergrey



Category: Marvel Cinematic Universe
Genre: 1940s, Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, F/M, First Time, Mild Sexual Content
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-05-09
Updated: 2015-05-09
Packaged: 2018-03-29 16:39:18
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 6,176
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3903364
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/wintergrey/pseuds/wintergrey
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p></p><blockquote>
  <p>“He’s the best guy I know. He’s just… you know, not the kind the girls go with.” Bucky looks genuinely frustrated. “He’s kind of small, that’s all. He can’t help that, but he’s really nice, I swear. I mean, he makes me look like a creep without even trying.”</p>
  <p>“Okay,” she says. It’s a chance for her to get more familiar with American culture as she’s meant to be doing. Training assignments are never exciting but this feels like punishment, playing at normalcy. She has too much time to compare her life as it is with everything it could be.</p>
  <p>“I know he’s not the type you—” Bucky stops mid-sentence. “Pardon?”</p>
</blockquote>
            </blockquote>





	Natalie, Natalya, Natasha

**Author's Note:**

> In this, Natasha's life also begins during Steve Rogers' early lifetime and both undergo similar processes to ensure longevity and enhanced abilities. Because I decided I didn't have enough angst in my life, I opted to imagine them meeting before either is affected, her as a young spy in training and him as a young man in the days before America enters WWII.
> 
> * * *

“So, here’s the thing.” The boy is painfully cute—blue-green eyes, sweet mouth, a real charmer. Boy, even if he’s at least Natalya’s age. He’s been hitting on another waitress all lunch hour, though. “Kitty there says she’ll go out with me if you can come along.”

That’s Kitty’s way of getting out of a date she’s not sure she wants to go on and Natalya is getting a little tired of it. She’s also very tired of being undercover here in New York City, and for what? To eavesdrop on a few CIA agents? For this, she perfected her Brooklyn accent?

“Your friend can’t get a date himself?” She wipes off her table and shakes out the cloth. “What did you say your name was, anyway?”

“Bucky.” He follows her back to the counter where she picks up fresh cutlery. “My friend’s Steve. And he can, I mean…” Natalya crosses her arms under her breasts and gives him an arch look. “Okay, he can’t, but it’s not his fault.”

That’s the first sincerity that she’s seen out of Bucky since he walked in the door. He’s pretty much made of charm and bravado. She knows the type too well. “Go on.”

“He’s the best guy I know. He’s just… you know, not the kind the girls go with.” Bucky looks genuinely frustrated. “He’s kind of small, that’s all. He can’t help that, but he’s really nice, I swear. I mean, he makes me look like a creep without even trying.”

“Okay,” she says. It’s a chance for her to get more familiar with American culture as she’s meant to be doing. Training assignments are never exciting but this feels like punishment, playing at normalcy. She has too much time to compare her life as it is with everything it could be.

“I know he’s not the type you—” Bucky stops mid-sentence. “Pardon?”

“I said okay.” Natalya hands him her notepad and pen. “Just write down where to meet you. I’ll be there. Kitty, too. She lives downstairs from me, I’ll make she sure comes.”

“I. Yeah.” Bucky’s cheeks are hotter than if she’d accepted a date with him. He scribbles down an address and a time. Movie theatre, before the early show. “Thanks. I mean, you’re… thanks.”

“If he’s as nice as you say, you don’t need to thank me.” Natalya takes back the pen and pad. She’s had enough of sitting home alone or going out with men who just want to get down her blouse and up her skirt. “Nice guys are thin on the ground in this town. Now get out and let me do my job.”

“Yes, ma’am.” Bucky holds his hands up, grinning ear to ear. “Anything you want. We’ll see you tonight.”

***

“You have to come.” Bucky ducks the laundry hanging in Steve’s apartment, following him into the kitchen. “Man, this girl. She’s out of my league. I didn’t ask her out because I thought she wouldn’t give me the time of day but she said—”

“She hasn’t met me.” Steve loves Bucky, he does, but Bucky has zero perspective about these things. He gets out the pot to start dinner for his mom. Breakfast, really, she’s working night shift and he likes to cook for her before she goes off. “Look, just tell ‘em I got sick or something. Maybe you can trade up.”

“I told her she was out your league.” Bucky gets the potatoes out—he knows the routine almost as well as Steve. “I said you were short and skinny and she’d never go for you but that you were the nicest guy in town.”

“You say this while I have a knife in my hand.” Steve looks up at Bucky, then brandishes the vegetable knife. “But hey, at least you’ve learned to be honest. I’m tired of people looking at me like you sold them a bill of goods.”

“And she said yes. She’s amazing, Steve. Red-head. Green eyes. And her—”

“Don’t tell me.” Steve doesn’t want to hear it. “I don’t need to know. I’ll go, but only because she was nice enough to say yes and I don’t want to be rude. Are you staying for dinner or not?”

“Staying.” Bucky takes the knife out of his hand. “You go get pretty, I’ll start dinner.”

Getting pretty isn’t an option but Steve can at least get clean. He and Bucky eat and put away the rest for Steve’s mom before they head out. It’s a short walk to the theatre and the weather is good. It’s almost summer—not so much that it’s hot but so that it’s kind of balmy and comfortable even in shirt-sleeves.

Bucky talks the whole way. Gossip, news, anything—he slings an arm around Steve’s shoulders like he did when they were kids and it makes Steve feel twelve but he can’t complain. Bucky’s the best friend a guy could have.

“Hey, there they are. The blonde is Kitty and the redhead is Natalie.”

Bucky had said out of his league. Out of Bucky’s league. He hadn’t said out of this world.

Natalie isn’t as tall as her friend, even in heels, and she’s all curves—Steve apologizes internally for even lingering on that but he wants to draw her because she has the proportions of a work of art. Her hair is red, really red, and falls in long waves past her shoulders. She looks like a movie star, not some Brooklyn waitress.

Kitty swishes in front of Steve like he’s not there, saying something to Bucky that Steve doesn’t hear and he can’t bring himself to care. Truth is, Steve doesn’t want Natalie to notice him because he wants to remember her the way she was in the moment before she knew he existed. Enough hiding, though. He steps out around Kitty to face the music. He steels himself for the expression girls always have when they see him for the first time.

That expression never comes, instead Steve looks up into a flawless smile and an eyeroll that reflects exactly what he’s—uncharitably—thinking about her friend. “Sorry about her. I’m Natalie.” She holds out her hand.

“Steve. Nice to meet you.” He can’t believe his voice works and he remembers to take her hand. It’s strong and cool and smooth. Her nails are painted a daring shade of red that matches her lipstick. Carnelian red. “Thanks for coming.”

“Well, I couldn’t pass up a chance to meet an actual nice guy in Brooklyn.” Natalie winks at him. “A unicorn, maybe I’d have stayed home and washed my hair.”

“Hey, Bucky’s a nice guy.” Steve isn’t going to let anyone say otherwise. When he turns to make sure Bucky’s still there, he realizes that he’s still holding her hand—or she’s still holding his.

“He’s honest, I’ll give him that.” Natalie lets her hand slip from his when he lets go. There’s something about her, the sparkle in her eyes and the colour in her cheeks, that makes her look like the personification of laughter. “But if he’s actually nice, he doesn’t stand a chance with Kitty.”

Kitty’s leaning into Bucky, giggling as she lets him light her cigarette.

“I think he’ll survive,” Steve admits. Cigarettes are not his friend and the last thing he needs is an asthmatic reaction tonight when things are going so well.

“Can we go? Do you mind?” Natalie asks in a low voice, getting Steve’s attention back. “I don’t smoke, and…” She wrinkles her nose as she shrugs. “You know?”

“We’ll see you two inside,” Steve says, then he offers Natalie his arm. “I know,” he admits as she slips her hand into the crook of his arm. She’s not really taller than him, it’s not horribly awkward.

People look at Steve differently, he notices right away. It’s not just that he’s with someone like Natalie, it’s that she actually seems like she wants to be with him. Men look at her and look at him and then their expressions change, sometimes sour and sometimes approving. Women smile at him, look him over speculatively in a way that says they’re trying to see under the surface—no one’s ever wondered what more there was to him before.

They sit on a bench in the theatre lobby and talk about the war—she’s so smart, she knows her geography better than Steve does. It’s almost like being with another guy except that she smells wonderful and her hands are soft on his when she corrects his drawing of the German Front. When he has it right, she doesn’t pull her hand away, she lets it rest on the back of his wrist like a bird alighting on a branch.

“You two ready?” Bucky arrives in a swirl of smoke and outdoor air, Kitty on his arm. She’s cute, golden hair and freckles and a snub nose, but she’s not Natalie.

“Let’s go.” Natalie offers Steve her hand to help her to her feet. She looks happy and Steve doesn’t care that that she’s out of his league, any of it. There’s a magic in her being happy that makes him glad he’s who he is if that’s what she needs.

***

Steve isn’t just nice. He’s good in a way Natalya doesn’t quite understand. It’s not even an American thing, she knows American men. He’s smart and talented and treats her like a person. He doesn’t try to hold her hand during the movie so she sneaks her hand under his to see what it’s like. It’s nice.

Next to Natalya, Bucky and Kitty are—the American term is “all over each other”. The Russian for it is pretty close. Steve glances past her and sees them then rolls his eyes, murmuring, “Sorry.”

Natalya bites her lip to stifle a giggle at that. He has a wonderfully expressive face, sharp lines and hollow cheeks but a sweet mouth and beautiful blue eyes with long lashes—and soft blonde hair that’s always falling across his forehead. She wishes he weren’t so kind. It’s inconvenient.

The movie is a little boring and it’s smoky in here, Natalya notices when Steve stifles a cough. It’s not as though Bucky and Kitty are going to miss them. “Let’s go,” she murmurs in his ear.

The look of surprise he gives her makes her freeze, afraid she’s been too forward, then he nods. He hesitates, anyway, then shakes his head slowly. “He won’t notice,” he mouths, nodding toward Bucky. Then, hand in hand, they slip out of the theatre. The fresh air outside is a relief.

“Are you all right?” Natalya knows asthma when she sees it.

“Yeah.” Steve ducks his head like he’s ashamed. In the halo of a streetlamp, she can see the flush on his cheeks.

“You should have said,” she scolds. If she’s not careful, her accent will slip through. Her handler gets angry with her, that she shows herself when she feels too much.

“It’s inconvenient.” Steve shakes his hair back as he looks up at her. “People, they shouldn’t have to make accommodations for me all the time. I’m fine, really. It’s nothing.”

Natalya could argue with him but he’s a man and they never know when they’re wrong, not when they’re as wrong as all that. It’s a waste of time, especially when she knows how to end any argument with a man—she has a variety of weapons to choose from. Because she likes this one so much, she only kisses him.

“If you’re worried about my breathing, you should know that’s not entirely helpful,” Steve says, when she’s done. Then he gives her a sheepish little smile. “You could be hazardous to my health.”

“No one ever died of being kissed,” she says indignantly. “At least not accidentally.”

“Then we should try that again because I’m pretty sure my heart stopped the first time.” He grabs her hand to pull her close and this time he’s the one who kisses her.

His boldness is what she likes best about him, he has such a bright spirit, and Natalya is old and wise enough—even at barely twenty-one—to know that she can’t ever see him again. She kisses him shamelessly, inappropriately, and doesn’t care. He tastes innocent, his hand cups her cheek instead of anywhere less decent, and she can feel him learning how to kiss her from her mouth.

“If you think no one ever died from being kissed, “ he says against her lips, “I think it’s because they weren’t kissing you right now. This isn’t something that would happen in my actual life. It’s so much better.”

For a brief moment, Natalya dreams of running away with this boy she hardly knows except for the things that matter to her, things she can already see clearly like his kindness and his humour. She dreams of of a tiny apartment in Brooklyn and his shirts and her stockings hung to dry in front of the window.

“I know what you mean,” she says softly. “But this is actually life. The better it is, the more it hurts to leave it. It’s a little cruel when things are beautiful.”

“Hey.” Steve pushes her hair back behind her ear, letting it slide through his long, clever fingers. His eyes are kind, she’s never thought of blue as being kind before. “Why are you sad?”

“I can’t see you again,” she says simply. “And I can’t tell you why, so please don’t ask. I’m sorry.”

His face is a study in concern and confusion but he nods, slowly. “Okay.” Just like that, and not because it’s easy. Just because she needs it to be that way. “Do you want me to walk you home?”

“Please.” Natalya tells herself she’s too well trained for her eyes to sting like this. Still, she can’t make herself let go of his hand.

“Can you tell me what you do?” he asks, when they stop on a street corner. “You don’t have to if you don’t—”

“I used to be a dancer,” she says, as they step out into the street. Dancer could mean anything—in America, if you don’t specify that you mean the right kind of dance, they think it’s just one step up from being a whore. “Not anymore.”

Being honest with him is her sole rebellion against the punishment of being trapped inside this secret life. She won’t tell him so much that he’s at risk but she can stop hiding. She misses herself bitterly and thinks maybe he can see that girl she’s been trained to forget.

“You must have been really beautiful on stage.” Steve looks over at her without judgment and gives her a smile. “I mean, you’re beautiful now just like this. Do you get tired of men telling you that? That you’re beautiful?”

“Only when they’re not actually looking at me, at who I am,” she says. “You look at me like I’m a person. Like a painter, I think that’s how you look at me. You look at everything like you want it to be beautiful. Me, your friend, the city.”

“Those things are beautiful, though,” he says, puzzling. His hand tangled with hers is warm, he draws her closer as another couple come down the sidewalk toward them.

“Other people wouldn’t agree. Your friend is feckless, the city soulless, and me—I’m cheap.”

“You’re not,” he starts to say.

“Used, if you’d rather another word,” she says, cutting him off. It’s all part of the training. One can’t be sentimental about or fearful of losing something one doesn’t have. Weapons don’t need virtue, anyway, Ivan tells her. It makes them useless.

Natalya stops in front of the narrow stairs to the walkup where she lives on the third floor. This, too, is cheap.

“You’re still beautiful,” Steve says, conceding a point to her but unwilling to relinquish his own. “I don’t see how those words apply to people like that anyway. People aren’t things. You’re not a thing, Natalie, you’re a person.”

“Come inside,” she says impulsively.

“If you like.” He looks around as though wondering why she wants him to come up instead of talking to him out here.

“I do.” Natalya keeps his hand in hers as she leads him inside.

***

Steve hasn’t ever been in a girl’s bedroom, much less in her apartment. The building reminds him of places where he grew up. Four tiny rooms and a narrow hall with a bathroom at one end and a kitchen at the other shared between all the residents. Natalie lets go his hand to unlock her door, then lets him in.

Natalie’s room is considerably less girly than he’d expected from pictures in magazines and scenes in movies. There are no stockings draped over the wardrobe doors, no underthings strewn about it. A few books on the windowsill are on subjects such as American politics, the history of New York City, and a cookbook for single young ladies.

The bed is a plain white frame with faded covers and a folded knit blanket at the foot, her vanity has a few things on it—perfume bottles, a photograph of a couple holding a curly-haired child, a notebook and pencil—but it’s all very tidy. A pair of pink satin ballet slippers hang from the mirror by their knotted ribbons. They’re very obviously used—the faded satin is stained in places and worn through over the toes.

“You said you danced.” He wants to take one of them in hand to admire them, the effort and hours of work written into the wear on them, but he refrains.

“I did. Then I got old,” she says, laughing.

“Old?” Steve turns to see her hanging up her little mint green angora sweater. It’s such a normal, domestic thing to see her doing. Comfortable.

“Or tired.” She takes off her white shoes and sets them on a low shelf next to a red pair that look far more daring. “I don’t dance anymore.”

“You can’t be older than I am.” Steve knows he doesn’t look his age but he’s a pretty good judge of other people.

“Tired isn’t about how old you are in years.” Natalie steps around him to sit at her vanity.

She opens a drawer to take out a few bobby pins. There’s a kind of magic in the way she twists up all that red hair and holds it in place with only three little pieces of steel, defying gravity. It’s one of the most intimate things Steve can imagine watching someone do, both her hands raised to bare the nape of her neck, to pull her hair back so that her face is unhidden, her long white fingers dancing through the brilliant red strands.

“You shouldn’t be tired,” he says, helpless to make it better. He stands behind her to watch her in her mirror, as though seeing her reflection instead will let him decipher her expression.

Natalie takes a tissue and dips it into a little white pot of cream, then uses it to wipe away her red lipstick and the powder on her face. Underneath her skin is fine and flawless like porcelain, her lips are the colour of wild roses, too pink to be natural but real nonetheless.

“I’m not tired when you kiss me,” she says, meeting in his eyes in the mirror at last. Steve touches her soft, damp cheek with his fingertips, then her lips, and she leans back against him. The person in the mirror, the person standing where he stands, is a stranger to him. In that frame, he glimpses a man he never thought he could be but something about her is alchemical.

“Then I should kiss you again.” It’s the only solution. If she’d asked him to jump from the Empire State Building, he would have asked her what direction to face.

“You should take me to bed.” She lifts her chin a fraction of an inch as though she’s gathering her pride, as though she’s afraid he’s going to laugh or worse.

“I would if I knew—” Steve begins, unable to be less than honest with her even though his cheeks are suddenly on fire.

“I know,” Natalie says simply. “I knew when I asked. I knew when I kissed you.” She puts her hand over his on her cheek. “I don’t want you any other way than how you are. I’ll show you how.”

“Then, yes.” There’s no question, and it’s not because he’ll never get a better offer. It’s because she wants him the way he is. This isn’t some compromise or act of charity for her, this is what she wants.

“It doesn’t change anything,” she warns. “I wish it did. You still have to go after, and not come back.” Her veneer, the one that doesn’t come off with cream and tissue, is nearly perfect but not perfect enough. Steve can see a well of sadness under the laughter he’d first seen in her countenance.

“If that’s what you want.” He dares to trail the fingers of his other hand down the marble column of her throat. “I’ll go.” He doesn’t know how to make a promise strong enough express his sincerity. “Just tell me when,” he adds, knowing full well that he’s signing up for a kind of hurt he can’t yet understand. He’ll understand tomorrow, though, and the day after that.

“I will.” She turns to kiss the palm of the hand she holds, soft and wet and open. The heat of it cuts through to a part of him he thought would be untouched forever. “But not tonight.”

Natalie isn’t so much taller than him in her stockings when she stands to kiss him on the mouth. The kisses he’d thought were scandalous in the street are nothing like this. He knows how to kiss her back now, because she taught him and because he needs to kiss her like he needs to breathe. She takes his hands and puts them on the little white buttons of her pink blouse.

Steve’s always been good with his hands and this is a challenge he doesn’t want to fail. He unbuttons her carefully, only to find another layer of cotton beneath, this one thinner and white and trimmed in lace. Natalie shows him where to find the fasteners of her skirt, the tiny hook and eye and the hidden zipper that he wouldn’t have known were there without her.

“Sometimes I forget what side it’s on,” she admits, then giggles in his ear. “And then I’m feeling myself up for five minutes trying to get out.” That makes him laugh, he’ll always associate the glide of fabric over the curve of a woman’s hips with laughing and the smell of the curve of her neck where he kisses her.

Natalie tosses her skirt and blouse over the back of her chair once he’s undone her. “Get started. Shoes. Socks,” she orders as she bends to rummage in the back of her wardrobe. Her little slip rides up to bare her pearly thighs where they’re dimpled by the taut fabric of her nude stockings and white garters. “Never leave your socks on.”

“Yes, ma’am.” Steve sits down on the edge of her little bed to do as he’s told. He tucks his socks in his shoes and then tucks those under the bed. Usually he wouldn’t stare, wouldn’t watch the swing of her hips and the way the strap of her slip slides down her shoulder when she sets a pair of small glasses down on the bedside table to pour something clear into each. But this is different.

“This is what we do where I come from, with friends.” Natalie offers him a glass and it smells sharp and clean, a bit dangerous. She taps her glass against his. “May you never have more sorrow than the drops you leave in your glass,” she says, then drinks it all at once.

Well, there’s more than one advantage of hanging around Bucky. You learn to survive just about anything with alcohol in it. Steve follows suit and it’s like swallowing polished fire but the aftertaste isn’t unpleasant. “Same to you. You don’t ask for none at all?” He relinquishes the glass to her.

“Who wants a life with no sorrow at all?” Natalie sets the glasses aside. Then she comes to sit on the bed, one leg tucked up under her so she’s facing him. “If you were never sad, how would you know you’d been happy?” She begins to undo Steve’s shirt and he’s more nervous about that than he was about undressing her.

“That’s a good point.” Watching her face, her little smile and the flutter of her lashes is good distraction. “It would be nice if you could skip the bad parts, though. Sometimes I think we’d all be better if we hurt a little less.”

“Suffering makes us who we are.” She tugs at his shirt and he has to stand up in front of her so she can continue. “Not because it hurts but because we can only do so much of it,” she says as she finishes unbuttoning and pulls his shirt down from his shoulders, leaving him in his undershirt. “So we have to be careful what pain we carry. The suffering we choose is what defines us.”

“Is that why you quit dancing? One pain for another?” Steve looks for the answer in her expression but she goes quiet in her face and her voice while she undoes his belt, then his fly. Her face is so still save for the press of her teeth in her lower lip that it starts to hurt him so he cups her chin in his hand and kisses her to make her let go. Then, she answers.

“No. Dancing never hurts. Even when it injures, there’s no pain. There’s only joy, even when there’s blood.” Natalie pushes up his undershirt to kiss his belly and he understands for the first time how vulnerable they all are when they’re bare to each other like this, skins and hearts.

“I’m sorry.” He regrets the question now. There are places he can’t go, no matter how much he wants to know the answer.

“Don’t be sorry. I didn’t really quit. My happiness just ran out,” she says quietly. Then she looks up at him with a serious expression that’s just this side of stern. “No more conversation. Just learning.”

But I am learning, he’s about to say when she draws his boxers aside and then her mouth is on him. He doesn’t know anything, not a damn thing. All he can do is shut up and let her teach him.

***

Sex is one of the oldest ways to rebel against suppression. When one can’t control anything else, sometimes one still has a say over one’s body. Natalya knows even that’s a luxury. That’s why it’s so good to take Steve into her like this, to teach him what it’s like to have her mouth on him, to hear words in his soft voice she knows he doesn’t usually say—especially not in the presence of a woman.

When he comes for her, it leaves him shaking. Natalya pulls him into her bed and undresses him the rest of the way between stopping to run her fingers through his fine golden hair and whisper to him how good it is to taste him still on her lips. He’s full of apologies as though he’s done something wrong and she shushes every one with a kiss.

Steve’s naked in her bed and she’s still clothed so she gets up. He reaches for her but she just kisses his hand.

“Watch,” she orders. “And tell me I’m pretty.”

“You are.” He pulls the sheets over his hips when he rolls over onto his side to see her clearly. “If I didn’t look for other things to say, I think I wouldn’t say anything else.”

“Other men say things like that and I think they must be lying.” Natalya slides one strap of her slip down, then the other. “But you say it and I think my own mind is the liar between the two of us.” She knows how to strip, she knows her lessons forward and backward, but it’s different when she’s doing it for someone she likes.

“You just can’t see yourself the way I do.” Steve rests his cheek on his hand, watching her. Already he looks different, the sharpness of his features softened by being sated. “I could show you.”

“Show me?” Natalya steps out of her slip and tosses it on the chair all in one practiced flourish. She puts a foot on the bed in front of Steve and looks down her body at him as she unclips her stocking to remove it. As she gathers the sheer fabric all the way down to her toes, she bends a little further to kiss him on the mouth.

“I’ll draw you,” he promises, once he kisses her back. His hand is cool and gentle on her neck when he keeps her there for one more kiss. “In the morning.”

“In the morning,” she concedes. If she’s going to upend her life for this, she’s going to make it last all night. She turns her attention to the rest of her clothes.

“Will you show me how to do that for you?” He wants to know as she’s unclasping her brassiere.

“Do what?” She lets the brassiere slide away, then drapes it over the rail at the end of the bed.

“What you did for me.” Steve sits up and reaches for her. She allows herself to be caught with his hand on her hip and drawn into kneeling on the bed with his arms around her waist. He kisses her belly the way she kissed his, then looks up at her. “Show me how to do that for you.”

Natalya smooths his hair back from his forehead. He has the impermanence of a dandelion gone to seed: waiting to be scattered by a strong wind but still full of promise. She kisses him on the brow, holds him against her for a moment.

“I will teach you anything you want to know,” she says, when she lets him go to lie down with him and kiss him on the mouth once their heads are on the pillows. She takes one of his hands and presses it between her thighs, over the damp fabric of her underpants. “Start here. Kiss me here. Then undress me and kiss me there again. Go slow. We have until morning.”

Morning seems like such a long way away when she says it—then when it comes, it comes too soon. The dawn light is milky against the windows and she’s half-sleeping when he gets out of her bed and pads over to her vanity.

“What are you doing?” When she rolls over on to her belly, her hair tumbles into her face. The pins are lost somewhere in the bed, victims of hours of making love.

“I promised to draw you.” He turns as she’s pushing her hair aside and he laughs. “I’d hoped to see your face.”

“Hush. Naked men should avoid too much attitude,” she says. She rolls to sit up and shakes her hair back. “You all look far too silly without your clothes to try a woman’s patience much.”

“I promise to keep that in mind.” Steve’s grin is sharp, his eyes bright. Attitude indeed. She likes that about him, that at least with her he’s comfortable in his own skin.

When he returns, he settles at the end of the end of the bed with his back to the rail. He has her notebook of blank paper—she uses it for surveillance sketches and maps—and a pencil. Natalya pushes herself to sitting, rearranging the pillows behind her.

“Like this?” She pulls her hair back, twisting it into a knot that will hold as long as she doesn’t move too much.

“Like that.” He’s watching her with a curious expression and she freezes.

“What?”

“It’s just beautiful when you put your hair up.” He’s already sketching, looking at her and hardly at all at the paper. “Your arms become a frame for your neck and your profile. It’s so… it looks like seeing a secret whispered. You’re art even before anyone captures it.”

Natalya’s cheeks are warm. “I want to keep it.” She glances at him without moving. “The picture.”

“It’s for you.” Steve pauses to meet her eyes and he smiles at her. It’s reassuring, like he’s taking her hand and holding on. “I won’t forget what you look like, not for the rest of my life.”

“I”ll forget you,” she says quietly, closing her eyes against the morning. “Or I’ll try. It’s better that way. I’m sorry.” She wishes she were the girl in the sketch, caught in this moment forever.

“Don’t be sorry,” Steve says, and his voice is so steady. “You do what you have to do. You don’t owe me anything.”

“Your friend was right.” She opens her eyes to look at him again, even though she doesn’t want to remember what he looks like with his sunlit hair falling across his brow and the dawn glittering in his lashes, his cheeks tinted rose from the warmth of looking at her naked. “He said you were the best guy he knew. I thought he was talking you up but he was telling the truth.”

“I try,” Steve says. The sound of his pencil on the paper is a ticking clock counting down to an ending. “I can’t do a lot. But I can be a good person. I’ve got that much.”

“It’s everything.” Natalya is trained not to cry, and it serves her well. “Not everyone gets to make that choice, to be good. I don’t. Promise me you won’t give it up.”

“I won’t,” he says after he’s quiet for a long time, save for the sound of his work. “I promise. I’ll be good enough for me and for anyone who can’t be. Starting with you.”

Natalya finds herself smiling. It shouldn’t make her feel better, it doesn’t mean anything. But it does. It means something because he says it. It’s some kind of magical chemistry that makes her feel clean.

When he leaves, he leaves her the girl in the sketchbook. She looks like art, like he said. She looks innocent though she’s bare-breasted and twisting up her bed-tangled hair.

Natalya wraps a cotton robe around her to walk him down to the front door and she stands there on the front steps with him as the morning sun runs down the street like warm honey, making everything hot and sweet, even saying goodbye.

“So. What do I do now?” He has his hands in his pockets and he turns his face up to hers, waiting for her to tell him.

“Go be happy.” She kisses him on the mouth and doesn’t care that the neighbourhood gossips are watching out their windows. She’ll be gone by noon. “Meet a nice girl. You’ll know her when you see her.”

“And you?” He tilts his head and his soft bangs sift down over his forehead the way they always do.

“I have to go to work,” she says. It’s the truth. Steve’s smile is slow, knowing. He may not know the details but he knows she’s not going back to the diner, that she’s living a lie she has to leave behind. For a moment, she’s afraid he’s going to ask her a question, then he just nods.

“Be careful.” He pulls her to him and kisses her until she tangles her hands in his hair to keep her balance and, somewhere across the street, a window slams shut in horror. Then, he lets her go and walks away from her, doing for her what she wasn’t sure she could do herself.

Turning to go inside, that she can do, if she pretends it doesn’t feel like anything. She has her hand on the door when she hears her name—almost her name.

“Natalie.” She turns and he’s standing on the sidewalk, smiling at her. “Hold onto the shoes. You might need them again some day. For dancing.”

“I will.” That she can do, too. She doesn’t think she’ll ever wear them again but it can’t hurt to hope. “You never know, right?”

“Yeah.” He gives her a little wave. “Life is long. And it’s pretty good. Don’t forget.”

Upstairs, Natalya starts packing. The girl in the book and her shoes go first into her bag. She opens the drawer that holds her hair pins, opens it all the way to pull her gun out of the back. It fits her hand like they were made for each other. Neither of them need any virtue, neither of them hold any memories.

 

**Works inspired by this one:**

  * [Proshchai (Goodbye, Goodbye)](https://archiveofourown.org/works/4171272) by [Liondragon (Sameshima_Shuzumi)](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Sameshima_Shuzumi/pseuds/Liondragon)




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